The latest technologies and trends reshape how companies take a new approach on their web development services and embrace new possibilities. Earlier times saw static websites as one of the top trends, while the later years preferred responsiveness. Chatbots shortly made an entry into the picture.
Keeping up with all of these new trends is scary and difficult for a lot of enterprises, and then there are those amazing shapeshifter companies that are ready to embrace every new technology and transform themselves according to the growing world. How do these businesses do this? The answer is awareness. These companies keep a close eye on every upcoming trend and they refuse to be discouraged by any change that needs to be done. If you want to be ready for the upcoming web development trends of the year, this blog is just for you.
Let’s find out what are the top web development trends in the year 2020:
1. Increasing mobile users and Responsive design
Responsive website design will not be a choice anymore, it’s a must for all businesses. Have a look at these stats: 35% of all the web traffic was created by mobile devices in 2015. This number increased to 43% in 2016. Then, in the year 2017, 50.3% of the total website traffic was generated on phones instead of tablets or computers. That’s a 7% hike in just one year.
With all these increasing numbers, it isn’t unusual that Google is officially bringing its mobile-first indexing system in the upcoming months.
Wondering what is mobile-first indexing? According to Search Engine Watch, “Currently, Google looks at the desktop version of a site and then bases how it will rank the mobile site according to that information. Once this update rolls out, the opposite of that will happen. Google will begin looking at your mobile site and from that, will rank the desktop site.”
How can companies be ready for this upcoming transition? Well, a mobile responsive website is the only solution.
According to a blog published by Google, “If you have a responsive site or a dynamic serving site where the primary content and markup is equivalent across mobile and desktop, you shouldn’t have to change anything.”
2. Lower development costs and Modular designing
Modular web designing permits web developers to reuse modules and components to develop web pages instead of building a web page from scratch. In other words, modular development is a better version of template designing. Web developers can utilize modular designing to build content blocks that can be used in a more efficient way.
Designing a modular web page is similar to building something using a Lego set. Each piece fits with another in a certain way to create the final design.
This is how Pattern Labs explains modular development: “We should be able to put UI patterns inside each other like Russian nesting dolls. But thinking about Russian nesting dolls, every layer has its own thickness — the equivalent of padding and margin in web design. When a three-layer doll is put next to a seven-layer doll, the spacing in between is uneven. While it’s not an issue in particular with dolls, on web pages, that could lead to either uneven white space or multilevel CSS overrides.”
3. AMP and Page load speed
With the launch of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), Google has been encouraging enterprises to build web pages that load instantly and run smoothly on mobile phones.
In a blog regarding AMPs, Google said, “We want web pages with rich content like video, animations, and graphics to work alongside smart ads and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant — no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.”
However, a lot of developers are against the idea of AMP because AMPs are extremely challenging to customize.
Despite all the limitations on the development side, the advantages of AMPs are powerful. The median loading time for an AMP HTML page is 0.7 seconds and the median loading time for regular non-AMP pages is around 22 seconds. This difference is too huge to ignore.
4. Voice search optimization
According to a recent report, 19% of Apple smartphone users call ‘Siri’ at least once every day, and 40% of adults and 55% of teenagers do voice searches every day. And in 2020, 50% of all web searches will be performed by voice. Between 2008 to 2016, voice searches were increased 35 times.
These stats suggest that voice search queries are a booming trend in search engines. And technology like Google Assistant from Google, Siri from iPhone, Alexa and Echo from Amazon, and Cortana on Android are making searches and other operating tasks effortless for consumers.
In a survey, two out of five people participants said that Voice Assistant-enabled devices are crucial to their lives. Voice search is the future of web searching. So how does this change web development? According to Google, “20% of all mobile searches are voice searches“, which suggests web developers will have to focus on building mobile responsive websites. Other than that, as consumers grow used to doing voice search and shift to voice browsing, businesses might ultimately need to integrate voice search functionality on your website.
Apart from these mentioned trends, the web development world is very likely to witness trends around Chatbots, customer support, streamlined workloads, API-first design, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence too.
It doesn’t take much time to build a website. But to develop a future-ready website, it does. Invest additional time to make these futuristic integrations to your website so that your business can stand out against the competition and you can be ready for the digital future.
References: CoreDNA, Dev.to, MereHead, RunningSEO, Acodez
Rachit Agarwal
